The Location of Utopia: Narrative Devices in a Renaissance Fiction

Abstract

Thomas More’s De Optimo Reipublicae Statu, better known as Utopia, was issued by the Louvain printer Thierry Martens late in 1516. There is something deeply ironical about the way in which the place of the approved title has been usurped by the name of More’s fictitious island, since for much of its career his libellus aureus has been subjected to the inflexible glare of literal interpretation. In Utopian terms literal interpretation means focussing on Book II, the actual account of the island society, and treating this as a series of reformist proposals discreetly decked in camouflage. From this vantage point More’s work is a fiction in the highly restricted sense that it adopts a veneer of make-believe either so as to alleviate intellectual drudgery on the part of the reader (a medicine of cherries) or to secure the author an escape route in the event of official disapproval. The extraordinary thing is that this way of reading the text — the prescriptive reading as we might call it — asserted its dominance at a very early date.

Is he deep, this Thomas More?

(Yesimin-Volpin 1961, ‘The Raven’, 53)